HomeBlogAre You Curious To Know When Not To Use The Sea Freight Services?

Are You Curious To Know When Not To Use The Sea Freight Services?

By reading the title, you must have started to wonder what might be the alternatives when sea freight is not suitable for your products. Since sea freight services are a boon for any business in terms of economic shipping cost as well as huge carrying capacity, there should be no question ideally to avoid sea freight services. However, before you completely discard the question, you should be aware of the situations when sea freight services can be substituted with other alternatives for better and faster order fulfillment.

Continue reading to put an end to your curiosity –

Shipping expensive items might be a huge concern

When you need to ship excessively expensive items, you think of the safety before the shipping cost. Since shipping via sea freight services involves transporting products through a combination of different modes like – sea, land and rail due to limited coverage of sea, this makes traceability of the product a hectic procedure for the managers. This makes sea freight services comparatively less reliable. It might be comparatively cheaper; however, you should opt for air freight services when your business can’t afford to lose out on any profits due to product getting lost in between.

Shipment is urgent and needs speedy delivery

Sea freight also suffers from limited vessel dispatch schedules, long transit routes, multiple stoppages, multi-mode transportation, harsh weather conditions and certain other conditions which ultimately have an impact on delivery timelines and can delay your product. These uncertainties in the delivery time are a cause of worry for your business. This acts as a trigger for your business that you must opt out of sea freight services and look for other faster alternatives.

When shelf life of product is quite less

In case of products with lesser shelf life, delivering them at the earliest is the highest priority which will extend the longevity of product usage. A lot of unnecessary time gets spent or the cargo may get detained in unpredictable activities during sea transit because of different customs regulations at multiple junctures and fluctuating government rules & regulations. To avoid all such risks, it is important to avoid sea freight services and look for better options.

When the cargo is fragile/sensitive

Multi-phase handling, loading/unloading and stuffing/de-stuffing of cargo are the critical aspects which need to be considered while shipping fragile cargo via sea freight services. In addition, the product is exposed to multiple jerks during its journey over sea due to diverse weather conditions. This may cause irreparable damage to the product leading to huge losses. In such cases, rather than opting for sea freight services, businesses should look for another safer transportation medium.

From the above 4 points, it is clear when you should make the move from sea freight services to air freight or another appropriate transportation medium. This would be a wise decision in ensuring customer satisfaction, better & faster reach and enhanced product safety. However, you might not have sufficient knowledge of when to switch between freight services, this responsibility lies with your freight forwarder who must guide you to select the best medium to transport. Therefore, look for a freight forwarder who has the experience and complete know how on when to choose which service.

Holisol is a leading supply chain organization providing solutions in retail (end-to-end fulfillment), Auto & Engineering (packaging & supply chain) and Consulting. Holisol works on the value proposition of Design-Implement-Manage to offer customers an experience of working like their own extended team, with affordable strategic and operational expertise.

Holisol has a workforce of +300 supply chain enthusiasts who are continuously building value through leadership, innovation and relationships. For more information visits us at www.holisolscs.ae